Ideas That Matter

Ideas That Matter: A Personal Guide for the 21st Century A. C. Grayling

British philosopher A. C. Grayling has prepared a “personal dictionary of ideas” that he thinks will be important to understanding our world in the coming century, covering topics political, religious, scientific, and cultural. Representative of the wave of “new [post-9/11] atheism,” Grayling “does not hold any brief for religion in general,” and so proceeds to kick it as often as he can (with “Religion” itself being the longest entry in the book). But at least, unlike many of the subjects surveyed, religion is something he knows a bit about. Neither informative nor comprehensive enough to be a true reference in the age of Wikipedia (there is, for example, no mention of global warming or climate change), nor opinionated and original enough to be a collection of essays, the book falls into a gap of inutility.